Haptics: Shaking Hands with a Robot

Robots and Androids: They walk, they talk, they see, and they hear, but do they feel what we feel? In this final article in her series on haptics, Laurie Rowell alerts us to the robotic hand pulling back the curtain on our future. Is it one we want to see?

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Human beings can be just plain weird on the subject of imitation people.
Consider that it was while watching the automata at the palace of Versailles
that Descartes decided that the whole canon of Western philosophy needed a
rethink.

I always imagine him sitting down to ponder the brainless clockwork
mannequins of the French court, trying to find some reliable benchmarks that he
could use to tell the metal ones from those that were biological. Or failing
that, how he himself differed from the metal figures. Did he stare into some
unblinking mechanical eye and say with triumph, "I think, therefore I
am"?

Since that time, we've had a slow climb from automata to robots to
androids, but a recent survey from the United Nations Economic Commission for
Europe (UN/ECE) says we are on the brink of robot boom time. Stable or falling
costs for robots, the rising cost of labor, and improvements in technology have
resulted in record numbers of robots ordered, according to a Wired News
article, "When Robots Rule the World."

Small wonder that other thinkers are taking time out to ponder what all this
means. They run the gamut from Ray Kurzweil (whose book The Age of Spiritual
Machines draws an optimistic picture of humans embracing a cyborg destiny)
to Marshall Brain (whose
Robotic Nation
site warns that full human membership in a world of robots means that at least
half of us will get the idle time we have been hoping foronly we'll
get it in the unemployment line).

I recommend the Robotic Nation essay site to those who haven't already
looked it over, not because I agree with all he says, but because if ever I saw
a site that will make almost anyone want to argue, this is it. But whether you
end up grousing about Brain's vision of the future that includes
unemployment rates of 50 percent, his proposed social engineering, or his view
of the technology, you'll have to agree that he has an important point:
Investing some thought up front in how robots will change our society might be a
good plan.

According to Marshall Brain, android development pretty well hinges on
developing adequate processing power and identifying vision algorithms for
interpreting what is artificially "seen." I'm not convinced that
they are the only issues holding us back. The world of robotics is dealing with
plenty of other challenges. Among them is the need for bots to lift something as
heavy as, say, a bowl of cereal, manipulate it the way that humans can (pouring
in the milk, taking it to the table), and neither squeeze it till it breaks nor
drop it so it shatters. We have a ways to go yet in that direction. And that, of
course, brings us to robot hapticsand what they can do right now that is
helping to propel us into our brave new robotic world.

In the Hands of our Successors

Robotic hands have long been taking on those industrial chores that are too
dangerous, heavy, or monotonous for humans. These days, they frequently also
take on tasks that are too delicate for us.

At Johns Hopkins University, researchers are using ever-more-sophisticated
systems to do tricky bits of surgery. Current strides in using robotic systems
with haptic feedback to conduct laparoscopic surgery fall short when these same
techniques are applied to heart surgery because the delicate business of tying
off sutures is still at the state where polypropylene stitches break, tearing
delicate tissue. That kind of slipped stitch creates serious concerns in heart
surgery; this mishap can cause permanent injury or death.

The problem is that the current practice of slicing through the sternum to do
heart surgery is invasive. Using the robotic da Vinci system, developed by
Intuitive Surgical,
surgeons can perform cardiac surgery with less pain and shorter recovery time
for patients, despite the concern with sutures. So it was obviously imperative
to reduce the risks of pulling and tearing that stitches posed.

To the da Vinci system, doctors work tools at a surgeon's console. Using
video overlay optics, the system projects a live video of the operation site
right on top of the operator's hands. The larger actions performed by the
surgeon are then reflected in scaled-down, microscopic actions by robotic
manipulators inside the patient, making very delicate movement possible. But
that isn't really good enough for the sutures in cardiac surgery. So
researchers David Yuh, Assistant Professor of Cardiac Surgery, and Allison
Okamura, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, have
teamed up to work on a haptic interface enhancement. Right now, the
experimenters are using a visual force-feedback field to help with the tricky
process of knot-tying, but it is accepted as an interim solution until the
delicate haptic interface is complete that will allow a surgeon to feel the
exact tension of the suture as he or she ties the knot.

And if very tiny surgery isn't strange enough for you, consider the
robohaptics going on under the sea. In NASA's NEEMO 7 project, a robotic
surgical system called Zeus recently aided a non-surgical team in the removal of
a gall bladder. Compared with heart surgery, not altogether amazing, eh? Well,
the surgeon (Dr Mehran Anvari) issued his commands from 1300 miles away in
Canada. Still not impressed? The "patient" (a surgical training dummy)
was in an underwater facility off the coast of Florida! And, by the way, the
operation was a success, and
reports
say that the patient's fine. The exciting implication of this experiment
suggests that robot-assisted telesurgery in space might be an option for those
who are really far from specialized medical help.

In the realm of haptic hand-holding, there are other subtle technology
triumphs afoot. Sommer Gentry of MIT has been busy creating a haptic hand that
sends dance signals from one partner to the other. Gentry and her husband, Dorry
Segev, a chief resident in surgery at Johns Hopkins, have a remarkable record in
swing-dance competitions nationally and internationally, so she knows something
about it. So back in 2002, she combined her interests in dance and robots to
program a PHANToM robotic device. The hand sent the signals of a lead dancer
well enough that human partners holding it could "follow" with the
appropriate swing steps.

Since that time, she has been refining her work. She wanted to separate the
haptic element from other considerations. Did the musical cues, she wondered,
influence the human choice for dance steps?

To test, she provided two human dance partners with different tunes,
anticipating some confusion in the ensuing steps. Oddly, leading and following
took place much as before, causing her to conclude that touch and a metronome
would be enough to communicate dance intent.

"This is encouraging," says Gentry, "because it allows
separation of the rhythmic motion cues from the musical meaning of a song. A
robot could 'dance' through a task in cooperation with a human without
requiring any model for how a human will interpret the emotion or lyrics of the
music."

Mind you, the dancing robot feet aren't ready yet, but give this lady a
bit more time, and I'm betting that the result will never once step on your
toes.